Posts Tagged ‘Laos’
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Cheuang Kavan; Decorah, Iowa; 3/10
Come January 2010, I will have lived in Decorah, Iowa, for 25 years. When I was 11 years old, my family escaped from Laos. We became refugees and stayed in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. Why did we flee from Laos? To escape the same communism my father had fought in his youth. Under communism, people were forced to work in collective farms, but the crops that were raised went to Russia and China in exchange for weapons and war planes, while the majority of the people were left starving. In 1984, Laos finally allowed the United States and other countries to offer refugees a new beginning. One of the ways they decide where to resettle a refugee is where that refugee has relatives. My aunt and uncle were living here in the United States.
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Tags: Human Rights, Laos, Migrants & Refugees, USA
Posted in Asia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Terrorism, Uncategorized, USA | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Ben Doherty; 13/1/10
The 4500 ethnic Hmong asylum seekers – including more than 40 probably bound for Australia – who were forcibly deported from Thailand in late December are being held in squalid secret camps in remote parts of Laos, guarded by soldiers. The Herald reached the main entrance of a camp at Paksan, on the Mekong River, where hundreds of Hmong hillt-ribes people stood barefoot in the dirt behind three metres of razor wire as loudspeakers ordered them to move away from the gate. The Hmong have historically suffered persecution, including arbitrary arrest and internment in re-education camps, at the hands of the communist Lao Government, because many of their ethnic minority were secretly recruited by the CIA to fight for the US during the Vietnam War and in the ”secret war” in Laos.
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Tags: Laos, Terrorism, Thailand, USA
Posted in Asia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War | No Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
31/12/09
The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, has asked the government of Laos to allow it access to the more than 4,000 Hmong asylum-seekers recently deported from Thailand. The agency says some of those sent back to Laos have refugee status and need international protection. In a statement, the UN also urged the Thai government to detail the assurances it recieved from the Laotian authorities on the treatment of the Hmong. Thai officials, supported by hundreds of Thai troops, completed the deportation of the ethnic Hmong back to Laos on Tuesday.
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Tags: Laos, Migrants & Refugees, Thailand, UN
Posted in Asia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, United Nations | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
29/12/09
Thailand has sent army troops with shields and batons to begin evicting 4000 ethnic Hmong asylum-seekers from Thai camps and send them back to Laos despite strong objections from the US and rights groups who fear they will face persecution. Under tight security, an initial group of Hmong – many of them children – was driven out of the camp in covered military trucks, each manned by several soldiers. Journalists kept at a distance from the camp could see the convoy as it left. Thai authorities said the first batch would include 448 people. Washington called for the eviction to stop. “The United States strongly urges Thai authorities to suspend this operation,” US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement, noting that the UN and Thailand in the past had deemed that many of the Hmong in this group were “in need of protection because of the threats they might face in Laos”.
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Tags: Laos, Terrorism, Thailand, USA
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
24/6/08
About 3,000 ethnic Hmong refugees people are refusing pressure from the Thai government to return home to Laos after a mass breakout last weekend from a detention centre in northern Thailand. On Friday some 5,000 refugees marched out of the Huey Nam Khao camp in Thailand’s Petchabun province, in an effort to bring attention to their claims for asylum. About 2,000 of the refugees have now reportedly agreed to return to Laos, some of them saying they had been offered $500 per family from the Laos government – the equivalent of half a years’ wage. But the remaining 3,000 have refused to move, and are demanding urgent help from the United Nations’ refugee agency.
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Tags: Human Rights, Laos, Refugees, Thailand
Posted in Asia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, United Nations | No Comments »
Friday, June 20th, 2008
Joanna Maxwell; 20/6/08
Chief Yong Tong Veng, head of the Hmong people at Petchabun camp, is desperate. ‘We are hiding in this camp and no-one has come to help, the food is not enough. Do not send us back to Laos. Do not send us back to Laos. Please ask UNHCR [the United Nations Refugee agency] to help us. The Lao government shoot with big bullets in the jungle and children die. Do not send us back to Laos …’ Some 8000 Hmong people live in this camp, 350 kilometres north of Bangkok, towards the Lao border. They are surrounded by barbed wire and under military guard. They have insufficient food, no schooling and limited ability to access Thai hospitals. Epidemics are a constant threat. They must wear identity cards marked ‘in Thailand illegally’. They could be pitched back into Laos and the terrors it holds for them at any time.
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Tags: Human Rights, Laos, Refugees, Thailand
Posted in Asia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, United Nations | No Comments »
